#5 How Engineering Made me a Better HRBP

The Offer

I had been an HR Business Partner for about seven years when I got the mental reset and upgraded thinking that I really needed. It opened brand new levels to the power of this role in ways I did not expect.

I had just come from the best job of my life, being an HRBP for a video game company I had relocated to California for. When I knew it was time to leave, I took six months to travel through South America. By the time I returned to NYC, I had confidence I had never had before. I interviewed with a sense of pride and clarity, something I did not have back when I interviewed for the San Francisco role. I had evidence, stories, purpose, and a much stronger understanding of what I actually did to impact the business. Within a month of being back, I had three offers from the four companies I was interviewing with. I had just verbally accepted one when I got an email that made me gasp.

A very well known, very prestigious tech F500 company reached out asking to interview for an HRBP Director role. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and naturally I agreed. Several weeks later, breaking my own rule about not rejecting an offer I had already verbally accepted, I signed with them.

During the interviews they explained there were two HRBP Director roles. One supported Marketing and the other supported two technical groups. When they made me the offer, I made it clear I preferred Marketing. That was acknowledged and accepted. But a few days before I started, my soon to be boss called. He told me he knew Marketing was my preference, but he wanted me to support the technical teams instead. He explained the reasoning in a way that was thoughtful and flattering, but I was annoyed. I knew nothing about engineering. I had no desire to learn it. My understanding of their jobs barely extended beyond joking about “computer people.”

Most of my work had been with sales, marketing, and data teams. These were groups filled with people who spoke in patterns and stories. They cared about customer journeys, revenue paths, campaign influence, and growth. I followed along easily when they spoke because I understood their world. I read all of their internal updates because it made me better at supporting them. Those partnerships made me feel immersed in the business. I loved that part of the role. I felt connected. I was disappointed knowing that would change. I told myself at least the Data team would feel familiar.

Orientation was generous. The culture was unlike anything I had experienced. They were a corporation that did not feel like one. People sat wherever they wanted. People spoke directly and casually. There were layers of approval for everything, yet the daily rhythm felt almost improvised. It was both loose and structured. I tried to adapt.

Within my first month, I was already managing a major organizational shift. The VP of Data, the part of the org I actually understood, was leaving. His team was being distributed across the others. I met with my boss and his executive partner for hours going through options. I felt competent in my recommendations. My boss smiled as he watched me work and told me again that this had been the right decision.

I held onto that because the next few months were rather uncomfortable

The Dissonance

Once the Data VP left, my only remaining group was a 450 person technical product organization. Half shaped how the product looked, felt, and worked. The other half built the systems underneath it. They created algorithms, tagging systems, classification models, and architecture that powered everything no one outside the company ever saw. I had never supported anything like that. Almost 70 percent of the org were engineers. The rest were product, design, research, data, and operations. Their leader was an engineer by background and a product owner by trade. His name was Rodger and English was his third language.

Even though I had been treated as a peer on executive teams before at my last role, here I did not feel included. I was not invited to leadership meetings. I was not in standups. I did not see roadmaps. Occasionally someone realized I was missing and sent summaries afterward.

It wasn't intended to be exclusionary - they did not mean anything by it. This was just how they operated. They moved at a very fast speed and they were used to working without an HRBP. I tried not to take it personally but I felt it anyway. Out of ten scheduled 1:1s with Rodger, maybe six happened. Only three were actually meaningful. The others were lists of administrative tasks.

A little after ninety days, I was catching up with my mentor and started to complain that I felt adrift and unseen. I felt like I was sitting in the corner of every conversation, unable to enter. I finally got added to the executive meeting invite but still had not said a word because I still did not understand how the business operated. The requests I received were Workday updates or job change forms. I had provided some coaching and an escalation but the thrill of that first reorg had faded and I simply hated that I did not add value.

I complained that marketing had been so much easier because at least I understood their world. She let me finish, then she stopped me and said she already knew what the problem was. She said I was still thinking like a marketing HRBP. I was using the same instincts, the same communication patterns, the same way of framing ideas. She said nothing would change until I understood that engineering had its own logic and its own values. They weren't rejecting me or judging me, we just weren't speaking the same language.

It hit hard because she was right. It stung because I had spent years telling other HRBPs that you cannot partner a business you do not understand. Now here I was, fluent in the worlds I knew and completely out of my depth in the one I was assigned.

Learning a New Language

So I started learning. I took introductory engineering classes. I watched videos on system design. I learned basic programming concepts. I finally learned what Java, C++, and Python actually meant beyond punchline references. I learned how architectural decisions ripple across entire systems. I learned how complexity compounds. I learned what engineers meant when they talked about tradeoff decisions. I learned how math is foundational and the focus is systems at scale.

And suddenly the org made sense. The roles, the workflows, the arguments, the frustrations. Once I understood their purpose, their world became less foreign.

Rodger began to notice. Some of our 1:1s got rather lively - I started asking him different questions. Not surface level questions. Questions that showed I was understanding what he was trying to do. Questions that connected what I knew about organizations with what I was learning about systems. One day our 1:1 ran almost twenty minutes over. As he wiped the whiteboard with his hand in light irritation, he said that my questions were annoying but he appreciated the curiosity. I told him his communication style was abrasive and insufferable but I appreciated how his brain worked and how he explained things. He looked at me in surprise, almost confused that I said it out loud, then laughed. It was the first moment we genuinely bonded.

As I learned more, I stopped feeling like the outsider. I began to understand the pride engineers take in precision. I understood why they need clarity before conversation. I understood why they argue the way they argue. I joined every update meeting and every product release debrief I could. I learned who wrote elegant code, who was fast in Python, who taught others quick tricks in Ruby, and who quietly held the entire ecosystem together through competence.

The most unexpected thing happened next. After a year in Product Engineering, I felt more connected to the business than I ever had in Marketing and Sales. Engineering was the blueprint of the whole company. It was the architecture, the internal logic, the actual product. Watching them work showed me what the business truly was.

Because I learned how they think, they saw me differently. I asked smarter questions. I wasted less time. I translated HR concepts into structures they understood. They trusted me because I had put in the effort to understand them and more so that I merged with them, I began to get invited to all sorts of product and tech update meetings, I knew when new releases and updates were coming, I knew about the big scary milestones, and the fun little technical updates and I saw them on the product and told them so and enjoyed at how they felt seen.

Becoming a New HRBP

One of the most important lessons I learned during this time was how powerful it is to fuse a business unit’s expertise with HR processes. Once I earned credibility, I started partnering with engineers and machine learning specialists on performance management and compensation. They taught me how to see organizational behavior like a system instead of a collection of isolated events. They showed me how to visualize skill decay, how to model bias reduction, and how to build decision paths that actually scale. Their thinking improved my work, and my knowledge of people and behavior improved theirs. HRBPs underestimate how transformative it is to treat their business partners as co designers instead of people we deliver processes to.

I remember thinking back to my offer and how annoyed I was that I had been assigned Engineering. If I had insisted on Marketing, I would have locked myself into a single job family. I would have spent three and a half more years reinforcing a competency I already had. It would have been interesting in a general sense because I would have seen how another company approached the same challenges. But the products were similar, the logic was familiar, and nothing would have truly stretched me. I would have grown horizontally instead of vertically. Instead, embracing something new and something uncomfortable became one of the most important opportunities of my entire career.

Rodger and I had many passionate disagreements during my three years there. But underneath all of them was respect. He began to seek my perspective when people issues touched the architecture of the work. I learned when to trust him because his insight was deeper than mine in areas where experience mattered. We built a real partnership that was grounded in mutual acknowledgment.

One of my proudest achievements came three weeks before my last day. During a town hall, I presented how we increased employee engagement from 71 to 89 percent. I showed how we rebuilt recognition, coaching, performance management and assessment. I shared how promotion outcomes had begun shifting for women, non binary engineers and engineers of color who had historically been overlooked. I presented a new organizational design model that aligned engineering, product, design, research, and data to competencies and product needs. I shared a talent skill map that one of the engineering leads helped me create to understand knowledge decay and tech debt and what it meant for hiring over the next few years.

After the town hall, Rodger sent a note to the CHRO with my boss copied. He wrote that he had never worked with an HR person like me. He wrote that he was disappointed I was leaving. He wrote that he would remember and continue the work we had done together.

To this day, it remains one of my proudest accomplishments.

Even though I had wanted Marketing. Even though I had resisted the assignment. Even though I had been frustrated for months, the experience changed me in ways I carry with me still. It made me sharper. It made me more adaptable, it made me realize that the "business" wasn't just the marketing and sales. It made me rethink my approach and how to combine competencies and skills and how to merge worlds together. It taught me that some of the greatest partnerships begin quietly, with two people who do not yet know how to hear each other.

And it taught me that trust built slowly becomes trust that lasts and I encourage every HRBP to adopt this mindset!

~Dan

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Daniel Space is an HRBP Senior Consultant, Speaker, Author and Evangelist for the HR function. He has worked for more than 20 years for companies like WebMD, PwC, EA Games, Spotify, Epic and AMEX before becoming a consultant. In 2020 he created his "DanFromHR" persona on social media to dispel common myths and misunderstandings about corporate america and is currently focused on empowering the untapped potential HRBPs can have